Believe it or not, selling sports cars isn’t a great idea if you want to make lots of money. In the big scheme of things, they’re a tiny niche in an enormous market, and their makers usually have to find other ways to boost revenues. Ferrari, for instance, is said to make more money from branded merchandise than it does through selling cars.
So it’s a cause for celebration that last week Mazda built its one-millionth MX-5 at its plant in Hiroshima. The diminutive MX-5 is officially the world’s best-selling sports car, and has been for some time, but it has taken 27 years and four generations of car to reach this milestone. Over the course of that evolution, Mazda has honed and refined it, but it has remained a fun little car. However, sometimes newer doesn’t necessarily mean more driver appeal.
A few years ago, soon after the launch of the third-generation MX-5, I attended an excellent event in the wilds of north-west Scotland, where Mazda’s British office had prepared something a bit different. The team bought 10 examples of the earliest MX-5s it could get its hands on – some costing barely Dh6,000 apiece – had each one thoroughly checked over by the company’s service engineers to make sure they were mechanically sound, then transported them to an airport at Inverness. There were also 10 brand-new ones, with the idea that we could compare and contrast, to see how far the MX-5 had come.
The drive from the airport to our hotel on the glorious Scottish coast was one of the most scenically impressive in my life. Initially, I turned up my nose at having to drive one of the tatty old cronks. But the stampede to get into the new cars was too much, so I reluctantly picked up a key for one of the old-timers.
What I found was that the more I drove it, the more I loved it. And when I did get a turn behind the wheel of a new example, there was something tangible missing from the experience. Yes, the heating was much improved, the fuel economy had increased, the engine was more refined, and there was less road noise and less buffeting when the roof was lowered. But somehow the “soul” of the original, its voice, had been stifled and sterilised.
The original MX-5 (which was launched in 1989, at least in Britain) is probably the closest I have come to driving a relatively modern car that reminds me of my Triumph TR6 – a machine that was considered old fashioned even in the late 1960s. Simple to drive with spirit, and eminently chuckable in the corners, each of the early examples I found myself in felt exactly the same. Some squeaked and groaned differently to others, some were tidier, but each offered the one thing missing by most cars on sale today: fun.
This was not lost on my fellow journalists and road testers. And I know this because when we were about to depart for the return journey along similar roads back to the airport, there was another stampede for the box of keys. Everyone wanted to drive the old ones, and this time my reserved nature meant I found myself pointing the nose of a new Mazda in the direction of the airport, while 10 more-boisterous types sped off in the oldies. It wouldn’t have been what Mazda’s people expected or wanted, but it was a telling experiment that didn’t backfire as such. The new car was still brilliant in its own way, and it continued to sell extremely well (for a sports car), but fun had definitely, although not entirely, been legislated and engineered out of proceedings a little bit.
